Why everybody should be angry at the militia in Oregon.

North and South Six Shooters, Indian Creek,, Utah 2014 

Armed gunmen invaded a wildlife refuge in Oregon to try and steal millions of acres, including the land in this photo, from the rest of us and it's really starting to piss me off. The militants themselves speak using religious phrases and they may actually believe they are doing God's will but if so, they think God wants them to take the West for themselves.  Yeah, this is a blog about climbing and this post is about climbing. It’s also about a whole, whole lot more.

Part of our freedom as I see it is being threatened by a fairly dangerous and underestimated movement. We need to protect public land from the politicians and militias that want to sell it off to the highest bidder and I think our freedom and quality of life depends upon it.  What is freedom if we don’t have the ability to come and go as we please?  You cannot be free if you are surrounded by No Trespassing signs unless you are rich enough to be the bastard that put them there. 

The threat to our freedom is often couched as a struggle for public land. It is that but those struggling to grab public land are banking that most of us won’t realize how much of our freedom is tied to land until it’s too late. A few weeks ago an armed militia took over a federal office for a wildlife refuge in Oregon and they occupy it still. They demand land reform, most notably they demand that land be taken out of public hands and auctioned off to ranchers.  Some of them want the government to retain ownership of the land but allow grazing permit holders to control how the land is used. It’s a sweet deal for the rancher because the government pays the bills for upkeep of the land. Their demands aren’t new but their tactics are. They are armed this time and they say they will kill law enforcement that try to arrest them. Thus far they are guilty of trespassing, breaking and entering, obstruction of justice, and resisting arrest.  But they aren’t the real threat to our freedom. 

You are free to climb here, hunt here, camp here, ski here in winter, or roll around in the grass in the summer. There are no fences or signs reading “No trespassing.” Mount McGinnis, Tongass National Forest, Alaska. 

It might not be a comfortable thought for many people but if you don’t live in the West, Alaska, or few other places in this country with public land, you are not as free as those of us with public land. I spent a year in the Midwest and the land is truly possessed, in this case it’s possessed by thousands of landowners. Everywhere you turn you encounter somebody’s fence and somebody’s sign. Land is fairly cheap so a working class person can buy a quarter acre lot and walk around on it like a rat in a cage. You are free to mow the lawn.  Lawn mowers are a big deal in the Midwest and it’s not surprising.  Neighborhoods have lawnmower races on their riding mowers. Fun stuff if you are into that sort of thing.  However, you can’t go hiking or climbing unless you trek to a few state parks where you get to share your day with all the other people that don’t have anywhere else to go. You can make a major trek to northern Minnesota, northern Wisconsin, or Michigan's upper peninsula and find open space. Indeed, you can be free living in up north in the Midwest and it's access to public land that makes that possible. It isn't the rural nature of the place that makes possible. People living in Seattle, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Denver, Salt Lake City and many other places have almost immediate access to fairly sizable tracts of public land even though many of them do not climb mountains or hike a trail they are free to choose to do so.

Physically and geographically climbs and hikes I have written about so far in this blog have had little in common other than that I have been to these places and they are all owned by the government.  It is not a coincidence because without even thinking about it I went to these places because it was public land or more specifically because these places are not private land. Scroll back to previous posts in this blog and you will see photos of Mount Shasta, the Mendenhall Towers, Split Thumb, the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, and the Superstition Mountains. While going there I didn’t see one No Trespassing sign and it wasn’t because I knocked them down.

Mike Miller’s Video footage, Lynn Canal. Tongass National Forest, Alaska Tongass.

Chilkat Range, Tongass National Forest. Alaska’s politicians want to get their hands on this land and open it to strip mining.

The threat is many loud mouthed conservatives cheering this militia on and that prominent politicians are among the cheerleaders.  Many scream for the neck of the police officer who shot LaVoy Finicum, the militia spokesmen that committed suicide by cop. It is tragic that anybody had to die but immoral to blame the cop. Perhaps, some blame could be placed on the cult of Cliven Bundy. Indeed they believe they are on God's errand and Finicum was willing to die for it. However, Finicum reached for his gun because he preferred to die rather than go to prison. I suppose I can understand his not wanting to prison but forcing a cop to shoot you because you would rather die is a really shitty thing to do. I think it was immoral of Finicum that his last act was to place his blood on someone else’s hands. It’s too bad this whole fiasco led to his death but the people who defend his actions concern me because the national craziness level is rising off the charts. Another concern is that the media uses words like activist or protester to describe men who broke into an office building and threatened to kill cops. I understand they vowed to never shoot at an officer unless he or she drew first but they had to know that no sane officer approaches an armed militant without his or her gun at ready. They expected a war because they weren't entirely delusional.

A very prominent threat is that many politicians sympathize with them and that includes Alaska’s congressional delegation. I can’t count the number of times I have heard my senators and representative use the words “Federal Overreach.” It’s a buzz phrase for politicians that want to allow corporations to run roughshod on the land. In Alaska, the words Federal Overreach are often used when the feds operate the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as a place for wildlife and not as an Exxon land holding, but the ANWR isn’t the only public property they want to steal and then give away.

There is a delegation in Congress pushing to give huge chunks of the West and Alaska to the states. Most of those states, including Alaska, are pushing for this so they can auction off the land or auction off the resources. Setting aside some very legitimate environmental concerns that come from rampant resource development, this raises the specter of access for all of us.

Students in the Juneau Icefield Research Project raise the flag on the Fourth of July at Camp 17, Tongass National Forest.




Right now anybody can go anywhere they want on public land. In Juneau, you can climb peaks in the icefield or boulder in the forest up the hill from my neighborhood. Many people living in the West and in Alaska take this sort of freedom for granted.  Until recently I did. I grew up in Utah, British Columbia, Arizona, and Missouri and even in Missouri I had some access to public land in the Mark Twain National Forest. I was so accustomed to being free to go wherever I wanted to go that I didn’t mentally process that many Americans don’t even know what they are missing. 

I don’t love the federal government. I think federal agencies trend toward red tape and suffer from swings in funding that cause them to bloat one year and starve the next.  Examples of government mismanagement are easy to see. However, even with the drilling and overgrazing we see on federal land, the public still has the ability to weigh in even though all too often we don't. Furthermore, quite often they do a great job and we ignore that too.

BLM land, Arctic North Slope. 

We ignore our public lands at our peril. If we allow  public land to pass to private hands, we lose not only our freedom to access the land but our freedom to participate in the dialog about how the land is managed. There could be a silver lining if this militant standoff spurs everybody from climbers to couch potatoes to pay attention to issues on public land. 

But even with the problems we see on federal land, their goal is to make it possible for us all to climb, hike, camp, hunt, fish, and many other activities on public land. I generally like federal employees and most do know the red tape can feel a bit clownish at times but they do care about the land. Trails are usually reasonably well maintained and most important we are allowed to use them.  Every acre of land deeded out of public hands runs the risk of a No Trespassing sign and often it runs the risk of a chain saw or a bulldozer to a greater degree than it does in public hands. 

Terminus of the Herbert Glacier, Tongass National Forest, Alaska

I agree with the Bundys about one thing; it's not about cattle. The militia standoff is not about grazing or drilling or mining; it's about whether public lands stay public. I don't even think the militia thinks it's about grazing. To them this is a holy war even though the end point is still thievery, as is the case with any holy war.  It's about ownership and control of the land and they are zealously out of control because they think God is on their side. The fact that they might graze it to dust once they own it, is secondary. 

Next time somebody talks about selling off public land, ask them where they plan to climb or hunt or fish or whatever it is they like to do. Next time you hear somebody use the phrase ‘federal overreach,” throw some rotten fruit at them. It’s a mild protest. Next time somebody tells you that God is on his side, throw rotten fruit at them with extra fervor. Our ability to access many things we love, including climbing, depends upon it. So does our freedom.